To celebrate California's leadership in space (51% of NASA's
procurements in 1977 went to California - the next state was
Alabama with 8%) and the occasion of the first free flight test of
the Space Shuttle, Governor Jerry Brown
hosted a "Space Day" on August 11, 1977, at
the Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles.

The event was organized by Russell Schweickart, on loan to
the Governor from NASA, and cosponsored by the state and the
aero-space industry. It got widespread news coverage because 1)
Brown had always been seen as strictly Mr. Era-of-Limits, 2) the
Carter administration was giving signs of reducing the NASA budget,
3) it was the summer of the phenomenal success of the film "Star
Wars'', and 4) Brown was the first major political figure to offer
a national vision of space adventure since President
Kennedy.

Speaking at ''Space Day" were all of the major NASA
leadership (including the new NASA Adminstrator Robert Frosch) and
also Gerard O'Neill, Carl Sagan, Jaques
Cousteau, Bruce Murray , head of the
JPL and Robert Anderson - head of Rockwell International, which
built the space shuttle.

To end the program former ''beat poet'' Michael McClure read a new work, ''Antechamber'',
against the silent showing of a film made of the most spectacular
NASA footage. Michael, who is a proponent of space exploration but
not of space colonies, jotted some poems during the course of the
day's talks and gave us permission to print them here.

Next morning, August 12, most of the "Space Day''
participants were at Edwards Air Force Base, along with 68,000
other kibitzers, to see the smoothly
successful first atmospheric flight of the space shuttle
Enterprise.

-SB

JERRY BROWN, 1977:

"Ecology and technology find a unity in Space."

"When the day of manufacturing in Space occurs and
extraterrestrial material is added into the economic equation, then
the old economic rules no longer apply. Going into Space is an
investment. It's not a waste of money, it's not a depleting asset,
it's an expanding asset, and through the creation of new wealth we
make possible the redistribution of more wealth to those who don't
have it."

"Awareness of limits leads to awareness of possibilities."

"As long as there is a safety valve of unexplored frontiers,
then the creative, the aggressive, the exploitive urges of human
beings can be channeled into long term possibilities and benefits.
But if those frontiers close down and people begin to turn in upon
themselves, that jeopardizes the democratic fabric."

"As for Space Colonies, it's not a question of whether - only
when and how."

You should know that all the interviews with O'Neill in this
book took place after midnight - the man is a model of
grace-despite-fatigue. This time it was after a full day of
Governor Brown's Space Day, at which O'Neill spoke, and a
night-piloting job to a desert airport. Jane McClure had recently
attended the press conference following the third (1977) NASA-Ames
Summer Study on space colonies and had some questions.

-SB

Jane McClure: What gave you the idea to give that space
problem to your students?

Gerard O'Neill: It was the year of the Apollo landing,
and I was teaching freshman physics. The course had never had a
theme as such so I chose the Apollo project rather than the
classical physics problems of pushing frictionless elephants up
inclined planes and so on as they always had. To a special seminar
of ten or twelve people I suggested the overall question, "Is it
possible for a technological civilization to do its natural
expansion in space rather than on the surface of the planet?" Or,
another way around "Is the planetary surface the right place to be
in the long run." As to why I asked that question, I have a feeling
that it probably came out of an automatic approach to problem
solving based on 15 years or so of having worked in experimental
high-energy physics up to that time.

Stewart Brand: You seem to have some habits now of how to
approach the right question. What is the structure of that?

O'Neill: Yes, there are a few prejudices that I've built
up over time, based on the experience of seeing experiments that
seemed to work easily or that had problems. One of them is, I found
that if you've got a complicated problem, it always seems to help
if you break it in pieces and then solve each piece separately. The
tendency of a fairly green designer is to try to take a problem and
come up with one grand solution that will do everything at the same
time. That's usually a mistake, There's another habit of thought,
and that is if you're looking at a very tough problem, it's often
useful to try to stand back from it and see if you're locked into
some thought pattern.

Brand: Like assuming you're stuck on a planet.

O'Neill: Right: You know the six-match problem? This is
the problem where you take six equal matches and without breaking
them or bending them or anything, you make four identical triangles
out of them. I don't think I'm a particularly good problem solver,
but it happens that when I was shown that problem I could solve it
very quickly.

McClure: Solve it! He did.

Brand: Jane, I wonder if it'd be interesting to probe a
little bit the nature of the younger generation of designers and
maniacs that Gerry's attracted. Like the ones who built the
mass-driver.

O'Neill: They're nice kids, aren't they? Well, two of the
students at least at present are hoping to come to Princeton and
graduate school within another year or so.

McClure: Where are they now?

O'Neill: One is at the University of Michigan that's
David Kaplan. He's just finishing his fourth year of a five year
program in which you get a combined degree in aerospace and
computer science. And Jonathan Newman, who has just finished his
junior year at Amherst in physics, with a fairly strong law
background. At the moment he's hoping to come to Princeton either
in aerospace engineering or physics.

McClure: How did they get connected with you in the first
place?

O'Neill: Well, David because I gave a lecture at the
University of Michigan a little over a year ago and I mentioned
that we were having a summer study and asked anybody who was
interested to see me. I was terribly impressed by David because he
proceeded to skip a meal and by the end of the day handed me a
completely typed up, one page, highly condensed resume of his
background, experience, interest, and all that. So I hired him for
the '76 summer study, at which he did a beautiful job. We stayed in
touch after that and then he came back to the '77 study as
well.

Kevin Fine came to MIT from a physics background, going into
graduate work in aerospace engineering. Professor Miller, who was
the head of the department and my host, offered to have some
graduate student work with me during my year there and it seemed to
us that Kevin was the best candidate.

McClure: Out of curiosity, how many women do you get
interested?

O'Neill: Lots.

McClure: Lots? I didn't see any working with you or on
the mass driver.

O'Neill: Well, it's the statistics of small numbers at
this point. The work I've been doing this past year is very
specialized in the sense that it's largely on this question of the
development of these electromagnetic mass drivers, so that tends to
mean someone with a fairly strong physics background. There are not
many women in that field.

Now, at the NASA-Ames summer study we just finished we had three
women professionals who were quite senior and all of them were
extremely good. One was in life sciences area - closed cycle
agriculture, another was in astronomy - she's an astronomer at
Palomar, and the third is a lawyer, who was involved in the
international law aspects of the project.

McClure: How would someone in my position get involved in
some sort of research or design problem in your line within about
two years. I have most of my schooling behind me and all I have to
do is specialize. At this point I could go in any direction.

O'Neill: I'd mostly try to find what you feel you
yourself are best at. What are the things that you most enjoy
doing?

McClure: Biology. And that doesn't really fit in ...

O'Neill: It does. Probably in the long run some of the
most interesting and least understood problems associated with all
of this are biology problems. For the physics and electrical
engineering and rocketry there's no problem finding people who can
do those jobs. There's lots and lots of such people.

Brand: What would be your list of biology-type
applications?

O'Neill: The biologically-oriented study group was the
largest single task group - about 15 people - that we had in this
year's summer study. There are obviously going to be space medical
questions. The most important being, "What is the range of
atmospheres in which it's possible for people to live comfortably
without developing respiratory problems?" For example, if most
people could exist indefinitely without harm living in a pure
oxygen atmosphere with an oxygen partial pressure equivalent to say
5000 foot elevation, that's terribly cheap to provide because the
Moon is mostly oxygen, and it's going to be literally a waste
product of space manufacturing. On the other hand if it turns out
that we have to carry along almost Earth normal air complete with
all that nitrogen, it's very expensive because it's not found on
the Moon. People have already lived for several days at a time in
pure oxygen atmospheres. It was done in the Apollo project. Once
the guys on the lunar module finished with their first EVA, they
dumped whatever nitrogen there was on board and lived in pure
oxygen the rest of the time. In some cases that was a week. So we
know that there aren't any drastic effects associated with pure
oxygen atmospheres. But we don't know whether there's something
that builds up with the passage of a long period of time, whether
there's subtle effects. That's pretty much physiology; you almost
have to be a doctor to handle that.

Brand: How about microbes and plants? Won't they need
atmospheric nitrogen?

O'Neill: That's still a big open area, a tremendous
amount of research to be done. In the very beginning I think that
we're not going to be using closed cycle agriculture. We'll just
carry up the same sort of dehydrated food that people are used to
in space programs.

McClure: At the press conference after the NASA-Ames
summer study, there was someone on the panel who, in response to a
question from the press on the psychological implications of space
travel and living, said there are three questions which they found
the most often asked by people -"Who's in charge?" "Who's paying
for this?" and "Aren't people going to go crazy?" I thought those
were three pretty definitive questions.

O'Neill: Well, we have of course, a tremendous amount of
data on the issue of isolated groups and their power structure. If
you look at the situation of sailing ships in the days when they
were out for months or years at a time, it was a very clear-cut
situation. It's been found that a dictatorship is what works. The
very important difference being that the dictator the ship's
captain or the captain of an airplane, is not there for life. He's
there for a voyage and he comes back. Whatever the guy does, he
knows that he's going to come back, his actions are going to be
reviewed and if he has done a bad job he won't be reappointed.

In the very beginning where you're dealing with let's say 100
people who are up there for a tour of duty of 6 months or a year or
something like that, they would probably end up with something
fairly equivalent to say an Antarctic colony, where there's always
a well-defined chain of command.

McClure: Also, I have the strange feeling that probably
you would quickly revert to a kind of a natural pecking order. In a
situation like that pecking orders are a kind of survival
mechanism.

O'Neill: It's a survival mechanism essentially because it
reduces conflict. There's nothing that produces conflict more than
an ill-defined situation of authority.

Brand: You know I wonder about the uses of all these
Earth-based examples and metaphors, such as we heard in the Space
Day speeches today. A reporter asked me whether I thought space
exploration was like Stonehenge or Queen Isabella and Columbus, or
the Nile and the dream of the seven cows. I told him I think we're
probably up against the limits of the usefulness of metaphor and
those things are going to lead us astray rather than inform us.

O'Neill: That's a good point. We may just have to face up
to the fact that here we are doing some things that has new
features. It you come back in 100 years there're probably going to
be some new words.

Brand: There'll be new things to name different degrees
of solar storm, different kinds of cabin fever.

McClure: What do you think of Cousteau's view that space
should not be inhabited, just as he thinks the underwater is not to
be inhabited, even though he was experimenting at one time with the
possibilities of living underwater, and you're experimenting now
with the possibilities of getting in space . . .

O'Neill: Well, I think it's an emotional response and you
know he's got a complete right to his opinion on that. In the case
of the ocean it's a bit different, Jane, because there are real
reasons why the ocean is a relatively harsh and unfriendly
environment to inhabit. The reasons are, first of all, that the
pressure problem under the oceans means that the amount of space
that's available is much more sharply limited. Once you go down far
enough that you're away from surface storms, you're down so far
you're in a region with pressure really way up, pressure vessels
are normally unstable under external pressure, you take a sphere
deform it a little bit under external pressure and its tendency is
to collapse all the way. Whereas in space you're dealing with
internal pressure; you take a sphere and deform it a little front
spherical shape and it'll return to the spherical shape because
that's the stable case, as long as the pressure is on the inside
rather than on the outside. And you're dealing with only 5 or 6
pounds per square inch instead of the hundreds of pounds per square
inch which you get to very quickly under the oceans. Also, under
the oceans you're cut off from your energy source - the sun - even
more than you are on land, whereas in space you're opening up your
energy source for full-time use at high intensity. It's just a
fundamentally different case.

McClure: When I first read your articles I was very
excited at the possibilities of space habitation.

O'Neill: I hope you still are.

McClure: I vacillate back and forth - I can't help it.
There's an emotional response and then a practical response.

O'Neill: You should, because we are dealing with some
potentially explosive issues. Anytime you get into something
powerful it always has the capability of good or evil, which is a
pomt that I make several times in my book and I'll return to it.
That's one reason why I'm so interested in trying to guide it to
the best of my ability because I can imagine the whole thing
wandering off.

Brand: What are some of your dark visions of how it might
go bad?

O'Neill: Maybe I'm too positively oriented to dwell on
them a great deal, Stewart, but one possibility would be that the
space habitat business might get done under complete military
domination. It might be that one country goes out and starts
building habitats in space and arms on the Earth at the same time
in a threatening way which makes it impossible for any other nation
to go out into space. That would certainly be a very dark vision if
that were to occur, because it would put a clamp on our human race
which is an even harsher clamp than what we've got right now, I
really hope that doesn't happen.

I think it's completely unrealistic to expect that space
colonies are going to develop in some way which I lay out in a
formula. Obviously. If it were going to do that then there's
something wrong with it. It's not worth doing. I have a fundamental
faith in the good sense of rather ordinary people, and the less the
intellectual pretensions of the people, the more faith I have in
their good sense. That's just based on my own experience ever since
I was 17 years old in the U.S. Navy. I'm thinking of people who
were in some cases semi-illiterate but whose basic common sense was
far superior to lots of extremely distinguished types that I've
known since who have 14 degrees after their names.

Brand: You trust the noncommissioned officers more than
the commissioned officers?

O'Neill: Well, I'm biased - I was a noncommissioned
officer myself. But I trust the ordinary seaman perhaps even
more.

Brand: You know, some of the papers from your conferences
are coming out in books now, but they're always a year or two
behind. What are you working on currently?

O'Neill: We're beginning to work out a real program
scenario in which you look at specific sets of lights and how much
goes up on which and all the rest of it. There was just the
beginnings of that in '76. In '77 I had a sabbatical year, which
was a great help, and with the kindness of MIT I spent it there.
This has been a very productive year mainly because of work on two
areas - one was the mass driver, the other was to follow-up the '76
study work on program development, trying to really look at the
minimum investment ways of getting to a big productive payback.
That's in an article which will be coming out in a month or
two.

Brand: Where?

O'Neill:Astronautics and Aeronautics. And the
Summer Study felt it made good sense to develop a program for how
you eventually realize space manufacturing. That's what John
Shettler from GM did. He ended up with a program in which you make
the first shuttle flight in 1985, and you're getting the first
power satellite on line in 1991 with a very rapid build up after
that, with Island One I suppose coming in the mid-to-late
199Os.

Brand: So far you've hung all of your investment payback
arguments on the solar satellite energy.

O'Neill: I think if you're honest you really have to
conclude that at the present state of our knowledge that's the only
big economic driver.

Brand: How about materials collected from asteroids for
use on the Earth?

O'Neill: You're up against a much tougher economics
there. Apollo had launch costs on the order of $1000 a kilogram
even up to low orbit. The shuttle is $20 million a flight, Let's
see-$20 million for 30,000 kilograms of metal, so that's like
several hundred dollars a kilogram right there. The price on the
surface of the Earth is more likely to be $1 or $2 a kilogram. The
price of raw materials is always in that range. Now, if you huff
and puff and make an enormous launch vehicle which can reduce the
launch costs far below what the shuttle can do, maybe you can get
down into the range of let's say $50 - $70 a kilogram to
geosynchronous orbit. What that means is that if you can build
something whose end use is in geosynchronous orbit, no matter how
wasteful and inefficient you are building it, you will have an
inherent added value of $70 per kilogram because that's what you
would have had to pay to bring that material, that equipment, up
from the surface of the Earth. Now, if you return material to the
Earth's surface, you no longer have that advantage. You don't have
that automatic added value. Now you're competing with Anaconda
Copper and U.S. Steel, who are selling their things for $1 or $2 a
kilogram.

The fact is that although we are working on something which I
think has a tremendous amount of potential, from an economic
viewpoint it is very dicey in that it's a one-crop economy. Energy.
If someone finds a solution to the energy problem which is better,
quicker and cheaper than satellite solar power done this way, then
we're wiped out.

McClure: At some point there is bound to be a real energy
crisis, and I get the feeling that you will get little support
until that time. Then all of a sudden you will be launched into
space to mine the Moon and asteroids and build solar
satellites.

O'Neill: I doubt if it'll be that automatic. For one
thing the whole energy problem is one which has enormous vested
interests right now. And I'm thinking not of the utilities,
investors, and so on. They don't have the technological hangups in
that respect. I was very impressed by the utilities people and the
investment people when we had a first meeting of our USRA
(University Space Research Association) advisory panel last month.
Those people said, "Look, we read this article, we see that with
some fairly reasonable set of assumptions that you may be talking
about energy for $500 a kilowatt or something like that. We don't
care whether you're getting it from the antennas or little green
men from Mars. If you can get us energy at $500 a kilowatt we'll
buy it. No problem. Just show us that it can be done." This is one
issue that's very clear. You're not going to get private capital
until the technological risk has been reduced almost to zero.

McClure: What kind of implications are private
investments going to add to the whole space program?

O'Neill: In fact we discussed that point. One of the men
who was on the panel is from an insurance company. He happens to
have been very heavily involved over a number of years in the
financing of the Quebec Hydro, which is the largest hydroelectric
project ever done in the western world. Quebec Hydro has a whole
set of horrendous political problems that I won't go into.
Basically, Churchill Falls is a source of energy for which the
installed cost is around $1600 a kilowatt, but once you have it
it's a free source of energy from there on because it's
hydroelectric. The financing involved is like 10 billion, 15
billion dollars, not peanuts by comparison with what we're dealing
with - it's very similar. But he made the point very strongly that
the technical issue of whether if could be done was never raised.
There were 20 volumes of study reports written on all of the
details, but the fundamental point was that everybody knows that
water falls downhill. We are a long way from space manufacturing
and satellite solar power being so proven and so taken for granted
that they're equivalent to saying that water runs downhill. And
it's not going to be until we have that degree of assurance that
we're going to get private capital. It's just going to have to be
governmental up to that point. Unless by some incredible magic one
can get an enormous broadly based consortium of people all over the
world to do it, which is probably completely ridiculous but it
every now and then crosses my mind in a wistful kind of way.

I don't feel that in the long run the details of how this all
gets started is going to be as important as the fact that it's
getting started. I think I could even adjust to the possibility
that it would be done and the United States might have no part in
it. Even if it meant the beginning of a decline or acceleration of
a decline of the United States, because I'm sure that whatever
nation or group of nations first makes really vigorous use of
non-terrestrial resources almost certainly has got a lease on the
next 100 years.

Brand: Japan has I'm told something like $2.8 billion a
year now in space, compared to our $4 billion.

O'Neill: I don't know what they're doing. I was told that
there had been a Japanese delegation which made an approach to NASA
to take part in exploration of satellite solar power, but that they
had been rebuffed. That's all I know.

Brand: Any indication of Russian interest?

O'Neill: They soak up everything that they can find out
on the subject. Articles of mine have been translated without my
knowledge into Russian newspapers. Then some academician of the
USSR gives an answer with the classical and expected statements -
first of all that, yes, these things will happen but not at all in
detail in the way that this guy from the West says, and besides it
was all done first by the Russians. I'd certainly point out that
Tsiolkovsky did in fact have most of these ideas many, many years
ago.

O'Neill: I think much more than that. I think we're
seeing an acceleration of the acceleration. It's getting completely
out of hand as something which can be coped with without some sort
of organization.

Brand: Pure nuisance for you, I imagine.

O'Neill: I wouldn't say that about something that I
basically love, but yeah it can absorb 100 hours of every day, and
100 becomes 200 hours if you wait two months. It's one reason that
we started the Institute for Space Studies at Princeton.

Brand: Say more about that.

O'Neill: At the moment it's not a great deal more than a
gleam in the eye, but it Is a nonprofit, tax-deductible corporation
in the state of New Jersey and it's now getting federal
incorporation also. It is also probably going to become a so-called
Nongovernmental Organization of the United Nations, which is
important because we want to be able to make an input to the U N
deliberations on such things as treaties about the Moon. We don't
want things to be bargained away which we may very much want to be
able to use later on, We have very good connections within the
United Nations and our friends there assure us that it will be a
real value to have that kind of status, and that it would be quite
easy to get.

The corporation has as officers people like myself, Tasha,
Brian, O'Leary, Steve Cheston . . .

Brand: Family.

O'Neill: Family. All the officers work with no
compensation. The organization has no overhead because it has no
staff and one fundamental article of faith of my own is that,
whatever happens to the institute, we will live within whatever
budget we have at the moment. If we have no money, we will spend no
money, so we are not going out and hiring permanent paid staff at
this stage of the game at all. If we can afford to bring in a Kelly
Girl occasionally to help with the typing that's about as far as we
go.

McClure: What are the issues that are being discussed in
the UN? Wasn't something mentioned about control of geosynchronous
orbits between nations?

O'Neill: Well, that's an example of one of these dark
prospects that you were asking about, Stewart - if there were to be
a binding set of treaties that were to go into effect that would
for example make it impossible for satellite solar power to exist
at all. It could happen.

Brand: Because of synchronous orbit being already full of
satellite at some time?

O'Neill: Well, legally full. From the technical viewpoint
I don't think there is a serious issue, because I can see all kinds
of ways around the problems of filling up geosynchronous orbits.
But it could be a very real issue from a legal viewpoint.

McClure: But you're afraid that if we start signing
treaties now before we know the possibilities of space and space
technology that we're going to end up limiting ourselves while
trying to keep that peace.

Brand: Like the Law of the Sea meetings. It's just
endless argument. Nobody's mining the sea because of the
arguments.

O'Neill: That could happen. Or, it could be that we in
the United States would give away in a Moon treaty any possibility
of our taking part in a consortium which would make use of the
lunar resources in the future. That would be enough to delay the
whole thing by 20 or 30 years. Ultimately I'm sure that there would
be some nation or group of nations who would go out there and do it
whatever the treaties said, but it might not be us.

Brand: Gerry, of all the designing that's gone on so far
it seems to me that the most demonstrably exciting thing is the
mass driver. it's new, it works, and it's ingenious as hell, What
was the genesis of that?

O'Neill: The first notions that I had about taking
material off the surface of the Moon involved these centrifugal
launching machines, which as far as we can tell could probably be
made to work, it's just that we think we have a better way. Toward
the end of 1973 there was an article which appeared in
Scientific American by Henry Kolm and Artie Thornton on the
subject of magnetic flight in connection with urban transit systems
which they had been working on. Henry had built a model of an urban
transit device which operated over a 300 foot track. It was a joint
project of MIT and Raytheon. It involved a superconducting set of
coils and demonstrated honest magnetic flight.

When I saw that, it filled in a third place where there were two
places already full and I was looking for a way to fill the third.
If you want to have an efficient launching machine it's got to have
several characteristics. First of all you don't want to throw away
anything expensive. In all the old-fashioned magnetic guns you
threw away the moving coil in the course of a shot and that
obviously wouldn't do. The second thing is that the acceleration by
magnetic fields is pretty easy. Germans even as far back as World
War I tried to make magnetic guns. The idea that you could
accelerate something by having a coil with a current in it is a
very old-fashioned idea. However, the stumbling block was that as
soon as you bring something up to high speed, how the heck do you
hold on to it? You can do the calculations, and you find that
wheels fly apart a tiny fraction of the speeds which you want on a
mass driver. You can't tolerate friction which speeds like a mile
per second.

Henry Kolm's and Artie Thornton's article filled in that big gap
by pointing out to me something I had simply never known before,
which was the existence of the phenomenon called magnetic flight.
It turned out it had been around for 60 years and was demonstrated
to Winston Churchill in 1914 at the Paris Exposition.

Brand: As a possible what?

O'Neill: As a system for moving packages rapidly around
the city of Paris. So, I did the initial calculations for a mass
driver, probably 20 or 30 pages of calculations, just to convince
myself that it did make sense and that the numbers worked out in a
reasonable way. I described it at the 1974 Princeton
conference.

Brand: Does this qualify as an invention?

O'Neill: Probably, from a legal point of view. I did
inquire of the research corporation which thinks about patents for
Princeton University as to whether it would be patentable. They
said yes it would be patentable, it qualified as an invention.
However they were not interested in patenting it because it was
obvious that if it had application it would be either implemented
by a government or a consortium of utilities.

Brand: Say a little about what's new about the
device.

O'Neill: In a synchronous motor like this the information
is fed back from the moving object. The critical thing about the
mass driver is that it's selftiming. What happens is that as the
bucket goes careening down the track it crosses microswitches, and
every time it crosses a microswitch for one particular coil, it
triggers that coil, and that gives the push at the right time to
keep it going. in the case of the real mass driver, that would be
the interrupting of a light beam rather than a microswitch. You're
not dealing with an unstable situation of riding a sort of magnetic
wave which is remorselessly going to move ahead whether the bucket
is there or not. The bucket does its own timing as it moves.

The fabled mass driver built from spare parts by MIT
students.

Brand: Do you know yet whether there is an optimum mass
for the mass driver?

O'Neill: We know that there isn't.

Brand: Infinity has just entered the discussion here.

O'Neill: Not really, no, it's just that particularly as a
result of this very intensive work during the last year we have now
all the sets of optimization formulas so we can work out masses.
There are now computer programs in which you plug in the conditions
that you want, the velocity that you want, how many kilograms per
second that you want to pump out, what's the diameter of the coils,
and one or two other things. You can punch all of those parameters
into an HB 67 program and it churns away and comes out and tells
you all the parameters of the mass driver, including the masses of
all the components involved, how much tonnage of coils, how much
tonnage of capacitors, all the rest. You can go down and
practically order it off the shelf. One of the things that we
investigated was the question of how sensitive this optimization is
to the diameter of the machine because if we change the diameter by
a factor of ten we change the mass of the payload by a factor of
1000. So we went over a factor of 1000 range of payload mass and
asked how much did the mass of the machine change. And it turned
out it only changed by 50% over that very large factor.

Brand: How about the energy requirement?

O'Neill: Very little change because it's extremely
efficient. On the lunar mass driver, our latest calculations show
it should be 97% efficient. The lunar machine has, as I recall,
about 100 megawatts of power input. Of that, 97 megawatts appears
as the kinetic energy of the payloads that are going off the
surface of the Moon. Only 3 megawatts go into radiator panels that
are having to radiate away the heat from the coils.

Brand: That's awesome.

O'Neill: The machine that we hope to use as the shuttle
upper stage to get from low Earth orbit to lunar orbit, the one
that would make use of the shuttle tankage's reaction mass, that is
about 75% efficient. It's less efficient because it's being
stressed a lot more We're running it at 1000 gravities acceleration
instead of 100 and it's going up to a much higher speed. It has to
go up to 10,000 meters per second.

Brand: How about this little one you've been
demonstrating?

O'Neill: Surprisingly enough it's about 50% efficient. I
like to go back and recall that in my old Physics Today
article where I expressed the concept of the mass driver, I was
estimating 29 gravities acceleration. This model that you saw
operate today runs - if you dunk it in liquid nitrogen to make the
core really cold - it runs at 35g's. And that's built from
scrap.

Brand: Is the space environment conducive to a very
effective mass driver?

O'Neill: It's far easier to make one in space than it is
anywhere else. For many reasons.

Brand: You mentioned the need for chilling it. You get
that naturally in space?

O'Neill: No. The average temperature in space is about
what it is on the Earth. It's the same equilibrium temperature that
you get if you toast one side and let it cool and toast the other
side. An artificial satellite is a small planet; therefore it heats
and cools like a planet. In the old days before light meters people
with cameras used to take pictures of the Moon and wanted to know
how to set their cameras, and everybody said, "It's very simple,
it's an object in bright sunlight."

McClure: Gerry, in my thoughts about space settlements I
get excited and then I get disturbed at the thought that 10,000
people are up there and what if there's a slip in some sort of
mechanics . .. I see everyone falling out into space.

O'Neill: Oh gosh!

McClure: It's just a visual image I get - how vulnerable
you are in space?

O'Neill: It's probably the same way that Columbus's
sailors felt.

McClure: Well, you gotta start doing it. It's the only
way to find out. You're not gonna go build this huge satellite
first and then put the people in it to see how it works.

O'Neill: You build up step by step.

McClure: I wanted to tell you one thing that a reporter
said right after your conference at NASA-Ames. I saw a reporter in
a phone booth. He was writing away frantically and speaking into
the phone giving directions for a typist on the other end.
Obviously it was going to be a big news story. He got ahold of his
editor and said, " Either this guy is just totally out of his mind
or he's really on to something!"

O'Neill: That's about as charitable a view as I'm asking
for at this point.

The shocks of this Age are the shocks of pace. Change
accelerates around us so rapidly that we are strangers to our own
pasts and even more to our futures. Gregory Bateson comments, ''I
think we could have handled the industrial revolution, given 500
years.''

In 100 years we have assuredly not handled it. We manufactured
an "Age of Discontmuity" (Peter Drucker) whose time horizon forward
is terrifyingly close - 4 years in politics, 10 years in major
corporations. I feel serene when I can comfortably encompass two
weeks ahead.

That's a pathological condition.

But I think it will pass, partly from its pure unworkability,
partly from the move of some of humanity into space. The project of
space exploration, industrialization, colonization, and migration
is so big and so slow and so engrossing that I think it will bring
the rest of human activity into its pace. If you want to inhabit a
moon of Jupiter - that's a reasonable want now - one of the skills
you must cultivate is patience. It's not like a TV set or a better
job - apparently cajolable from a quick politician. Your access to
Jupiter has to be won - at its pace - from a difficult solar
system.

With the first color photograph of the Earth from its Moon, the
whole Earth became a political idea and ecology a political
movement which has continued to strengthen in its 11 years so far.
Though I have thought at times that the health of space perspective
on Earthly activities has gone as far as it can, recently I'm not
so sure.

The reach of human intelligence to the stars is an enormous
undertaking. When I grasp the reality of that, not just the words,
but the actual project, a religious scale of presence that spans
centuries comforts me. Feeling comfortable and curious that far
forward, and therefore that far backward, I begin to feel at home
again. Interested in events longer than the ego's prison of ''my
lifetime", I'm free to care for other large continuities such as
the life of the Earth and the drama of human culture. Previously
overwhelming urgencies, like the deadline on this book for me, fall
into microcosmic place - worth doing, connected, but not
urgent.

Religious-scale projects - and their comforts - have often
scourged humankind. I'm thinking of Egyptian pyramids, Moslem
jihads, Mongol hordes, Christian crusades, the Third Reich, world
Communism, maybe science itself. Part of their hazard is that they
become their own universe - an infinite regress of self-reference
grounded nowhere.

Space exploration is grounded firmly on the abyss. Space is so
impossible an environment for us soft, moist creatures that even
with our vaulting abstractions we will have to move carefufly,
ponderously into that dazzling vacuum.

By way of thanks. to Gerry O'Neill and Rusty Schweickart, who
are essentially co-authors of this book, let me leave you with the
two images of them that abide with me. Both are flying.

Gerry is in the left front seat, his wife Tasha in the right, of
a Piper Cherokee. It's night. We're at about 6,000 feet. The two of
them are navigating like mad - twitching dials, jotting figures,
muttering into the transceiver which is shrieking back, glancing
down at the town-lit coastal fog that has slightly complicated this
flight of ninety miles from Los Angeles to Mohave. All of us
(there's Jane McClure as well, wide-eyed on her first small plane
flight) are grey with fatigue from Governor Brown's "Space Day",
facing still the small-hours interview you just read, a wink of
sleep, and a dawn drive to Edwards Air Force Base for the space
shuttle free flight test.

Here at 6,000 feet we're in dreamtime. Gerry opines where we
are. Tasha checks a map, gently corrects him. He thanks her,
queries the radio, jots the response on his kneepad, confirms with
Tasha, takes a new heading, she switches maps, and they discuss
whether the Mojave airport might have its lights on. They've done
this for several hundred thousand miles, clear to Venezuela one
time. From the back seat it's ballet to watch them, pas de
deux.

In Rusty's case he and his wife Clare and I and a lady were
camping on a desert island off Nova Scotia, devouring in the late
twilight sweet mackerel that Rusty had just caught. Rusty and Clare
were drifting easy, free for a couple of days from their five kids
who were camping elsewhere. Rusty glanced at the sky - "There goes
the first one."

Sure enough, a satellite glowed north in polar orbit among stars
that Rusty knows by name from years of celestial navigation and
keeps an eye on. While Clare asked how many satellites you're
likely to see of an evening any more, and Rusty opined a
calculation, I began to watch him funny, a personal sense of his
Apollo experience at last forming in me. Clare knocked a gold spike
in it a moment later.

''You know, Rusty, I never did get out at night to see you when
you were a star.''